Operationalizing Insights Supports Multinational Banking Acquisitions

It is commonplace for retail banks and financial institutions to see frequent and ongoing mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. Chances are the retail bank you entrust is a composite or divestiture of multiple financial institutions through the years.

Such is the case with ABANCA, a growing and leading bank in the Galicia region.

ABANCA is a flagship retail and commercial banking group in the Northwest of Spain. It has spent years merging, acquiring, and divesting. The bank has presence in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, France, the UK, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, and the USA. With over 2M personal and commercial customers, globally, ABANCA’s strategic initiatives include transforming the organization to be more flexible, simplified, and cooperative. They are doing so by boosting innovation through strengthening its data analytics with the goal of improving customer experience via client knowledge.

ABANCA's efforts start with creating a single version of data truth.

As an expanding global banking group, every merger, acquisition, and divestiture requires governance, rules, and policies to be set. ABANCA operationalizes insights using Teradata Vantage™, creating a single version of data truth by incorporating information from its multinational bank acquisitions to extend data analytics across all organizations. The goal? Global data truth is improving client knowledge among ABANCA's employees; ensuring acquisitions, mergers, and divestitures follow a consistent process, ultimately leading to improved customer experience.

ABANCA by the numbers

2M

customers

630

global branches

11

countries

$57B

total assets

José Manuel Valiňo

José Valiňo holds a MS degree in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and conducted postgraduate studies at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. His career began at Arthur Andersen, later becoming a partner in Europa Management Consulting and Meta Group, now Gartner Group. In 2000, he moved to the banking industry where he currently serves as an executive director of IT, innovation, process and operations at ABANCA.

Answers and Outcomes

Realizing different users require different data access, needs, and tools, ABANCA followed the Layered Data Architecture (LDA) as defined in The Sentient Enterprise to organize data into logical layers from business users, to analytical users, to advanced users, to data scientists.

“The LDA is the foundation of the Agile Data Platform. It’s the engine that drives our frictionless, self-service analytics model that gives centralized access for decentralized use cases.”

A well understood big picture of the organization needs to be captured and communicated in the form of a model.

A data model help developers and analysts better understand a set of data elements and the corresponding business rules. Every model has a defined scope. Likewise, a data model can represent a specific functional area such as risk management or treasury, or the entire organization. ABANCA invested in the Teradata Financial Services Data Model (FSDM) from the beginning. From this, ABANCA was able to quickly prove value throughout its enterprise by understanding data and its relationships.

“We have built a single version of truth with a very powerful data model using Teradata Vantage. The simplicity of the data model and the power of Vantage allows us to separate some business and to deliver it to others, and at the same time, bring in and incorporate other businesses to us.”

The data model becomes an enabler, allowing ABANCA to understand relationships between tables.

The users become the community that is guided by the layered data architecture – which defines the users’ access based on their roles. Within the ABANCA ecosystem, the layers of the data architecture (data lab, presentation layer, aggregation, calculation, and staging) is designed to give the users appropriate access to the data they need to do their job.

ABANCA has defined processes that, along with their data model, ensure they don’t duplicate data elements, but rather reuse data elements that they have already defined and captured.

ABANCA recognizes that operationalizing insights via decentralized access to the data allows the entire organization to act. In doing so, ABANCA has seen their Net Promoter Score (NPS) increase 300%. A significant improvement not only seen and felt internally, but by their global customers.